Music and Rebellion: A timeless phenomenon

Pop culture has many times been deemed a catalyst for change. The era of rock and roll altered genre and social beliefs, but how far did these changes really rift the beliefs of a conformist society?

By Lindsay Blair

A smoke-filled club in Memphis, late on a Saturday night in the 1954. The drums begin to beat and the strings of a guitar rift and surge through the awaiting crowds. The beat flows through the room. The girls scream.

Here is the rise of a new phenomenon in entertainment and popular culture. Here is a young rising star, who shakes his hips to the electric beat of rock and roll and the girls go wild. Here is Elvis Aaron Presley.

The adults disagree. The images of Elvis gyrating on their screens are deemed inappropriate and crude. But a rebellion against conformity is the new hip. A generational conflict ensues and social change is merely a drum-beat away.

In decades gone by music meant more than just entertainment. Music was political activism and expression of social frustrations, which created the basis of social change and a revolt against conformity. Before marketing corporations founded rock and roll music as the profitable product that it has become, rhythm and blues music was seen as a foundation for social and political change. The marketing of music today revolves around making money rather than influencing changes in race, civil rights and acting out against conformity. Can we ever go back to those days when music was so much more than an institution?

According to David P. Szatmary, author of “Rockin’ in Time: A social history of rock and roll”, the blues formed the basis of rock and roll. The blues were a creation of black slaves, who used this music to communicate their adaptations from African musical heritage to their new American surroundings. Later, stars such as Elvis Presley in 1954 and Chuck Berry adapted the euphemistic rock and roll beats to bring forth a music genre accessible to all races. This, in the heart of the civil rights movement in the US, caused revolutionary conflicts and changes and brought the power of youth culture to the surface.

“There were a lot of things going on (in the fifties) but probably the one thing that had the most resonance and the most long standing influence would be the connections between rock and roll and race,” according the Professor Jessamyn Newhaus at Plattsburgh State.

“For the US, race was the perpetual problem, it was really what really influenced the music of rock and roll. Other things were going on, consumer culture, generational divide, but the fact that rock and roll had its roots in an African American art form was something that made it revolutionary. It was something that white teenagers and black teenagers both liked and wanted to listen to and that really did cross boundaries,” continued Newhaus, professor in the Department of history.

The fifties was a time when social boundaries were being tested, according to Newhaus. The civil rights movement was in full swing. Anyone who had access to a television or a newspaper, could see that there were constant challenges against society’s “status-quo” and racial segregations were being directly disputed. Although it was not the first time that these things had been challenged, this was the time when a new extent was reached and people wanted to bring their beliefs into the mainstream.

Stemming from the African American musical art form and spreading from Chicago and New York hotspots, rock and roll in some ways was a catalyst for change, says Hannah Sheehy, a senior at Plattsburgh State majoring in American History and Politics.

“Rebellion and rejecting of conformity came in (in the fifties). I think it that it became bohemian to not conform,”

“Before the 1950s all the music was what they called crooners, it was all cool and innocent and calm and mellow. (Although) there’s always been a thing with music and rebellion, like jazz on the 20s, in the late fifties, rock and roll was the start of (change) and it was threatening to adults because it was about having sex and staying up to party all night,” says Sheehy.

Conformity was a major factor of society at the time when rock and roll music came about. Social tensions surrounding post-war climate and Cold war ideologies caused friction between right and wrong ways of behaving. The behavior of youth culture, in relation to their adherence to rock and roll music was a threat to adults, who saw rock and roll as a medium for delinquents and sexual deviants.

Rock and roll was a euphemism for sexual intercourse. “The beat of the music was very wild and it wasn’t steady like the crooners, it was very provocative. I think a lot of it was that youth just liked the music but adults thought that they liked it because they wanted to go out and have sex and fight like the lyrics said,” says Sheehy.

Newhaus agrees, “There were young women who did seem out of control, they were screaming and yelling they were expressing their sexuality in a way that was definitely making grown-ups anxious.”

The generational gap between youths and adults came to a peak in the fifties and sixties. Sheehy says, “By that stage youth were a lot more intelligent that a lot of people gave them credit for and I think they had their own opinions that were obviously different to their parents because they were a whole new generation.”

Jill Keefe, a woman who experienced the generational conflicts in the era, told the New York Times, “For most of us it was the music, rock and roll that captured the energy. It was the catalyst for social change, for protest, for rebellion.”

Music has through time created a kind of phenomenon and means of expression. The era of rock and roll encapsulated a social vision which revolutionized cultural, political and social beliefs. In a report titled, “The Consumption of Music and the Expression of Values” by Wilfred Dolfsma and published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. in 1999. It states, “Within a period of two years after 1955, for instance, the music scene in the USA changed dramatically. Record companies are major players in the economic sphere nowadays, and pop music (culture) is used extensively in places or fields that seem at first sight not directly related to it.

“The phenomenon has strictly economic aspects, some of which are measurable but also has aspects that might be better called 'social' or 'cultural'. These different aspects are intertwined. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s pop music (culture) has become an important way for many people to distinguish themselves from others. They consume music as a way of showing who they are, and what they want to be.”

Rock and roll music was used as a means of expression, as well as a means of profitable entertainment. Rock and roll as music was a commodity; it was bought and sold, according to Newhaus. The success of rock and roll and the changes it caused, however, were not a commodity. Abolishment of segregation in music venues, acting out against conformity and challenging a very rigid domestic containment all became part of a bigger social movement, which, although surrounded by generational conflict, altered perceptions timelessly.

But this is a timeless thing. It is a cycle, adults will always in some part disagree with what youth are doing, according to Newhaus. “That’s what makes pop culture so interesting it wasn’t that people set out to make a statement, to change the world, they set out to express themselves, to be musicians. But it just so happened that the impact of that (in the fifties and sixties) it had social ramifications as well,”

Pop culture has a major influence on society, it changes norms and it alters perceptions. But Newhaus believes that this timeless concept is still happening today and probably into the future, “I would say we are on the tail end of a panic about video games. For a long time people were worried about video games,”

“People have just gotten used to it, I don’t know what the next thing will be, if I could predict that then I would be a genius. I could see into the future.”